I setup my render for a 600 frame scene last night and when I awoke, this morning, only 35 frames had completed. I have seen the ads, here on the board, for the Rebus Render farm service and thought I’d give it a try.
I signed up, and downloaded their project manager software. This all went fine.
I used their cost calculator and purchased some credits that I thought would cover the render.
I set the render in motion and watched as my render points went down and thumbnails appeared in the farm manager’s preview window. The service is very fast, the software was telling me that I had 20 machines rendering my scene. Wow!
As I approached zero money, I hit pause but the rendering did not stop. I kind of panicked as my account went negative so I hit the stop button and it finally quit charging me.
All my money was spent and I went negative, which I did not think I could do. On the website, it claims you have to explicitly enable go negative, but that is not the case with a “manual” render. Because my account was negative, I could not download my results until I balanced my account.
I contacted tech support and told them of my experience and a fellow named Andre was quite helpful in explaining to me what happened and resolving my situation. In the end, Andre balanced my account and provided me with my full render of 300 frames (even though I canceled at around 70 frames).
The service worked and their support was very helpful.
However, the website claims that the entire process is fully automated. But this is only for commercial packages that are supported by the render farm management software and Blender is not in that list. Anytime you issue a render for Blender, it is considered a manual task (I guess someone has to set it up?) and you are charged an additional 40 euros every time you process a render. So remember to add 40 to the number you get from the website calculator. I was unaware of this charge so I thought I’d let the community know.
The scene was fairly simple but had a complex texture applied to it. No image maps were involved.
Imagine a long tube, subdivided with the normals reversed so they are facing inward. Create two paths that run down the center of the tube. On one of the paths is a lamp and on another path is a camera. The lamp is 15 frames ahead of the camera in time, so the camera is chasing the lamp through the tube which was deformed along the path as well.
The material was made up of a single cloud texture, voroni F4 mapped to three slots. Color, Normal and alpha. I turned on the warp factor for the second two slots. I had never used the warp factor in a material and was quite pleased with how it relayed the distortion from one channel to another. I animated the offset of the cloud texture so it kind morphed as you moved through the tube. On top of all that, I turned on RaytracedMirror and set the depth to 1.
This scene, rendered at 1280x720 with OSA 5 enabled, took about 12 minutes per frame on my DUO 2 running @ 2.5Mhz.
On the Rebus render farm, I was able to render about 70 frames in 12 minutes. This cost me 15 Euros. Then I stopped the render as mentioned above.
So it looks like their service is 70 times faster than my laptop.
My experience (so far) with RebusFarm is not very positive. I purchased some render credits, submitted a test scene, and manually (FTP) submitted the file. You then have to email them so that they’ll submit the job to the farm. It took over five hours before I got a response from them. The subject line said ‘Job Submitted’ but the body of the message told me that they did not support Blender 2.48 (which is what I told them in my submit request) and were still running 2.46.
The problem is: They DIDN’T actually submit the job. I emailed them the next day, telling them to please submit the job despite the version difference – just to see if it would work. I still haven’t received a response from them and the job does not appear to have been submitted.
They supply an ICQ number for support. I’ve been unable to get a response that way, either, despite their status being “Online.”
I’ve also had no luck with two test scenes I’ve sent to ResPower. Their support, it seems, is not available on the weekends. This is less than optimal if you’re on a deadline and YOU are working on the weekend to get it done.
So far, I’ve had excellent success with Green Button. They’re inexpensive and the scenes (the same ones I’ve sent to the other two services) render fine.
RebusFarm informs me that they’ve upgraded to 2.49.
They submitted my test scene and claim that it took less than a minute to do all 150 frames. My CoreDuo laptop takes about one minute per frame.
So… RebusFarm appears to be faster than GreenButton when it comes to render times. But having to wait to have the file submitted manually (as opposed to GreenButton’s awesome submit script inside Blender) makes GreenButton the current winner in my book.
ResPower still hasn’t gotten back to me on the problems I’ve had with the scene on their farm.
Would you mind sharing the ‘bugs’ you’ve encountered? What should people watch out for? Also, is ResPower aware of these bugs? Are they likely to fix them?
Yes, $20/mo for unlimited rendering is a fantastic price. However, for those who want to use a service for rendering scenes for client work, it’s more important for the service to be reliable and as bug-free as possible. A good price is great, but it doesn’t comfort you the night before a deadline when you can’t get your client’s scene rendered.
Over the past week or so I have sent nine test files to ResPower and all of them have failed to render. After contacting tech support (and then waiting days for a reply!) they just said, “I would recommend that you re-upload your scene file and submit it for rendering again.” WTF?
So I downloaded the “Regression Suite” and uploaded a test file from that, thinking there might be something weird with my .blend files. Alas, that failed, too.
The other files that have failed at ResPower have rendered fine on GreenButton and RebusFarm.
So I’m wondering… Is ResPower’s Blender broken?!? Can anyone get a successful render of a .blend file from their service at this point?
Brandon made me aware of the issue you’re facing this morning. I’m sorry for the lack of responsiveness. I’ve seen some balls getting dropped lately and am working with our team on improving our support process so that hopefully this doesn’t happen going forward.
The error your scene is producing (including the one from the blender distribution) is this:
only .blend files can be loaded from command line,
other file types require interactive mode.
This error message typically happens when users only partially upload a .blend file, hence the suggestion you re-upload it.
This happens after our python script issues a Blender.Load( scene-file ) for your .blend file. What’s weird is that the .blend file is copied to the render node correctly, and if you just open the .blend file inside Blender (e.g., Ctrl+O/F1), it opens fine.
So this looks like a bug in Blender’s python support under 2.49, but we haven’t confirmed this just yet. I suspect that some global variable is not set properly when running a script from the command line. This happened when we first started supporting blender - we wrote and provided a patch for that bug back then, but if I recall, that one happened when the render started, not when the scene was loaded.
We’re currently paring down our script to something that can be posted with a bug report to blender.org. Hopefully we can make a patch to submit shortly after that.
I’m very glad to hear that this has been confirmed and that a fix is being investigated. I know ResPower has done a lot for the Blender community (not least of which is providing render services at a fantastic price) and I’m all but counting on ResPower to be my primary render service once my business is actively rendering client projects. I’ll be watching my inbox for a messasge saying that Blender files are once again working on ResPower.
Just to be clear, 2.48a and earlier is working, and this appears to only be a problem w/ 2.49, afaik. There are jobs plowing through for other users that haven’t upgraded to 2.49 yet.
Thought I would post this here so anybody with similar
issues or concern would get an update as well.
There is apparently a bug in Blender where a python script
calling Blender.Load for a compressed .blend while Blender is
in “background mode” will result in the “only .blend files…”
error message.
We are working on adding a patch to the farm to decompress the
file (rather than waiting for a Blender patch and official
release) prior to trying to render it. However, even this
will likely take a few days to get through the entire
development and test process.
In the mean time, the easiest workaround seems to be to open
your .blend file in “interactive mode” (regular Blender), and
save it with the “compressed” check turned off.
If you are compressing to save bandwidth for transfer, you
can zip your file using e.g., info-zip or Winzip, and use
the Unpack Files feature on the web site to decompress the
.zip file so that your .blend becomes visible to the
Render Wizard.
